Media Temple: Our Review

Media Temple is often the hosting service of choice for Web developers. It offers numerous advanced features that may be a bit beyond the knowledge of or usefulness for the average Web publisher. The company has been around since 1998, and has grown right along with the Internet and its ever-increasing demands for bandwidth, speed, and reliability.

While the company is based in the United States, Media Temple serves customers in more than 100 countries. They’re on the Inc. 500 list, and claim a handful of top brands among their customers, including Starbucks, Toyota, and Samsung. This is impressive for sure, but may also demonstrate the type of publisher who is best served by Media Temple, its features, and its prices.

Features

Shared Hosting Features

Media Temple’s shared hosting was created for blogs, portfolios, and small businesses. While it’s more expensive than the shared hosting offered by other providers, that’s due to Media Temple’s Grid hosting setup. If Grid features are important to you, this option may be worth the increased cost.

Grid hosting

Optimized for WordPress

100 GB of storage

1 TB of scaleable bandwidth

1,000 email accounts

Up to 100 websites on the same account

24/7/365 live tech support

Updated LAMP stack

PHP5 with Fast CGI

CloudFlare with Railgun for advanced security and protection

What makes Grid hosting unique is that rather than stuffing thousands of websites onto the same server—which is usually, by definition, what shared hosting is—Media Temple has constructed a grid of multiple servers that all work to host every site. This means more speed and reliability, and less sharing of resources. And should one server go down, the rest of the servers in the grid can pick up the slack, meaning no downtime due to server failure, which is a possibility with traditional shared hosting.

Developer Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting Features

As the name suggests, Media Temple’s VPS hosting caters to developers who will be able to customize server environments, and who will want or need the ability to choose their operating system (OS).

Three levels with ranges for memory, storage, bandwidth, and price

Linux VPS hosting with custom OS

Ubuntu

CentOS

Debian

Fedora

Full SSH + root access

Instant provisioning and scaling

Fast reboot/rebuild

99.999% money-back guaranteed server uptime

Instant real-time server status

Premium hardware with RAID-10 disks

Parallels Power Panel Web interface

No-hassle backup plan

Managed VPS Hosting Features

This option is best for small businesses, resellers, and designers. Although it’s managed, this option offers easy control panel and root access, and the ability to install more than 200 apps.

Three levels with ranges for memory, storage, bandwidth, and price

Managed OS support, and security

99.999% money-back guaranteed managed uptime

Powerful reseller features

24/7 tech support via phone, chat, and Twitter

64-bit CentOS 6, MySQL 5.5, and PHP5.4

No-hassle backup plan

It should be obvious by now that Media Temple caters to the more-advanced user. For those less-technically-savvy publishers who want these enhanced features, but don’t have the skills necessary to manage them, it may be a good idea to consider the managed hosting option, bearing in mind its expense.

But for developers, Media Temple’s features and structure will mean less time tinkering and repairing sites, and more time building them.

Benefits Breakdown

The Good

Grid-based hosting, even in shared plans, means 24/7/365 uptime, and the ability to handle traffic spikes without your site going down.

Advanced features for speed, reliability, and function.

The Not-So-Good

Media Temple is a bit on the expensive side, even for its shared hosting option, which may make it a bit out of reach for someone just looking to start a blog or a small business site.

Even the shared hosting option is a bit more advanced than most providers’ shared plans, and may require either more technical knowledge, or help in managing sites on that plan.